[Bug 906045] Re: installer crashed grub-efi

[Yuv]

Although both  11.04 (Natty) and 11.10 (Oneiric) have reached End Of
Life, this bug seems to be still alive in newer versions of Ubiquity.
It may be a duplicate of bug 1176674.  I have encountered something very
similar (I would dare to say the same error) trying to install Lubuntu
13.10 (Saucy) developer preview on a SONY Vaio Pro 13.  unfortunately I
have no network connection yet on the machine, hence a manual report, in
this bug.

I am attempting a UEFI dual boot system, Windows 8 and Lubuntu 13.10.  I
have wiped out SONY's proprietary mess.  Then with Gparted I have marked
the top 80GB of the SSD off-limit and let Microsoft Windows 8 install
itself in the other 40GB.  Everything works as expected and at the end
of the process I get a GPT disk with an MS recovery partition, an EFI
boot partition, another weird small partition that Gparted does not
recognized, the 40GB main MS Windwos 8 partition and 80GB free space for
Lubuntu.

First bug: when I run the installer (downloaded a live CD about a week
ago), it does not recognized the existing Windows 8 and states that "The
computer currently has no detected O/S", leaving me only with two
options: wipe out everything and install Lubuntu over it; or manual
partitioning.  One might cynically note that it is not necessary for
Ubiquity to replicate the behaviour of a well known competitor mentioned
above ;-)

When I do "something else" (yes, it pains me to sacrifice 40GB for that
other O/S, but it is a non-negotiable requirement on that laptop at this
point in time), the partitioner recognize the EFI partition, so I only
set up one extra partition in the rest of the SSD (and a SWAP partition
on an SD card, just for the install, the intention is to not subject the
SSD to the hard life of a SWAP partition and run the notebook without
SWAP like I do with my current notebook).  The installer takes its
course and quits with the error message that th grub-efi package failed
to install into /target/.

Then I try something else: I set the EFI partition to a FAT32 partition
and then I can give it the mount point /boot/efi per instructions at
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI#Creating_an_EFI_partition --  I
don't actually format/create the partition (because it contains the boot
code for Windows), just point the installer there.  It fails again, this
time with a message saying that an attempt to mount filesystem vfat at
/boot/efi failed.

Next I will try backing the Microsoft EFI files up and formatting the
EFI partition.  At this point I just wanted to make sure that the
knowledge is out there about the problem of the current (as of last
week) Lubuntu installer to deal with EFI machines.

** Tags removed: natty
** Tags added: saucy

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/906045

Title:
  installer crashed  grub-efi

Status in “ubiquity” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  doing   a fresh install of Ubuntu 11.04 or 11.10 onto a UEFI system
  (ASUS eee PC 1215b), the installer crash during the grub installation,
  on 11.04 and error message is displayed showing the grub-efi failed to
  install. On 11.10 when the installer fails it drops to cli show kernel
  failure messages relating to the efibootmgr, something similiar to
  http://askubuntu.com/questions/70025/how-do-i-install-on-an-uefi-asus-
  1215b-netbook

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